On Halloween, the scariest night in this god-awful election season, you have to feel sorry for Hill – a woman seemingly destined to be haunted by men who just can’t keep it in their pants.
First, of course, came Bill. Then came Trumpet. And now the compulsive exhibitionist who is the estranged husband of Hillary Clinton’s right-hand woman, Huma Abedin – Anthony the Weiner. (Technically, that should be spelled wiener, but who has time for technicalities with so much at stake?) Talk about your triangulation.
We are left with two questions – the same two questions we’re always left with, because they can never be answered:
Why are men obsessed with their privates?
And why do smart women make such foolish choices when it comes to men?
Though Clinton mercifully still has a commanding lead, there is no question that Donald Trump is creeping up on her – not so much because of revelations of new Clinton-related emails on the computer belonging to Weiner, under FBI investigation for allegedly sexting a 15-year-old – but because Trump is doing better among independents and undecideds while Gary Johnson picks up some votes.
Trump now has as good a chance to be president as the Chicago Cubs – who just forced Game Six – have of winning the World Series. Sheesh.
FBI Director James Comey – who felt so compelled to be all noble and rush out with news of emails that may A. be old and B. contain nothing about Clinton – may nonetheless be doing Clinton a favor. If, as I have always predicted, she wins, and the emails came out after, it would look as if the Obama Administration had withheld information, that the election was indeed “rigged” in her favor. So painful as it is, better now than later.
And it gives Clinton a chance to be truly presidential – to say “put the cards on the table and let the chips fall where they may.” This is, ultimately, on her. Her secretiveness may prove her Achilles’ heel. And she will have to live with the consequences.
Of course, is she just temperamentally secretive or have years of living with an expressive philanderer also taught her to be guarded? Would Comey be the man on the email hot seat had Attorney General Loretta Lynch not recused herself after she “accidentally” met with Bill Clinton in July at an airport as the deathless email drama first played out? What role, if any, did the Clintons’ marriage play in Abedin’s decision to stay with her husband when his sexting scandal first broke in 2011? (The two separated this year after the revelation that Weiner sexted a woman in the presence of the couple’s young son.)
We will probably never fully understand what attracts one person to another and keeps that attraction going. We are mysteries, even to ourselves. But I’d like to take a stab at why women choose and stay with men who are no good for them. Hearing about the latest email crisis – and feeling my stomach drop through the floor – I was reminded of a conversation I had with actor Damian Lewis (“Homeland”) when he starred as Soames Forsyte in the 2002-04 miniseries remake of “The Forsyte Saga” that aired on PBS. Soames is a despicable character who rapes his wife, Irene (Gina McKee). But Lewis’ portrayal of a man desperately in love with a woman who’s only married him for security was so powerful and sympathetic that it tipped the balance in the series. I found myself feeling sorry for him and hating her for her coldness to him – even though what he did was inexcusable and, to my mind, unforgivable.
They begin by lying to themselves and wind up lying to each other, I told Lewis. We then fell into a conversation that I think hits at the heart of why women marry and stay with men who end up hurting them. Women think they can change men, Lewis and I agreed.
But short of a road-to-Damascus moment, people don’t change. They become more of themselves. Irene and Soames’ marriage has to end, because the rape creates a chasm that cannot be breached but also because neither could ever be what the other wanted. Soames and Irene cannot change. They can only reflect the intractability of the other.
If it hadn’t before, the end of the Abedin-Weiner marriage has now reached a similar revelatory moment.
Let’s just pray that in its wake, the country doesn’t become collateral damage.